Posts tagged bats

mindblowingscience:

A comparison of bat and bird wings reveals their evolutionary paths are vastly different

Bats are incredibly diverse animals: They can climb onto other animals to drink their blood, pluck insects from leaves or hover to drink nectar from tropical flowers, all of which require distinctive wing designs.

But why aren’t there any flightless bats that behave like ostriches—long-legged creatures that wade along riverbanks for fish like herons—or bats that spend their lives at sea, like the wandering albatross?

Researchers may have just found the answer: Unlike birds, the evolution of bats’ wings and legs is tightly coupled, which may have prevented them from filling as many ecological niches as birds.

“We initially expected to confirm that bat evolution is similar to that of birds, and that their wings and legs evolve independently of one another. The fact we found the opposite was greatly surprising,” said Andrew Orkney, postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Brandon Hedrick, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

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Our notions of what it means to have a mind have too often been governed by assumptions about what it means to be human. But there is no necessary logical connection between the two. There is often an assumption that a digital mind will either be, or aspire to be, like our own. We can see this at play in artificial beings from Pinocchio to the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL to Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But a machine mind won’t be a human-like mind — at least not precisely, and not intentionally. Machines are developing a separate kind of interaction and interrelation with the world, which means they will develop new and different kinds of minds, minds to which human beings cannot have direct access. A human being will never know exactly what it’s like to be a bot, because we do not inhabit their modes of interaction.

via http://reallifemag.com/what-its-like-to-be-a-bot/

“Deep in the belly of a giant fiberglass triceratops, eight rare bats have made a home.”

–Today in “linguists are not kidding when they say that your command of English enables you to understand sentences that have never occurred before in the entire history of the human species.” (fromAtlas Obscura)